I began thinking about why am I constructing almost a shadow father or ghost father in my head into Graham Greene in response to the father who created me? What's going on here? I think a part of my sense is it's every boy's story. When we are kids, we imagine that to define ourselves or to find ourselves means charting your own individuality, making your own destiny and actually running away from your parents and your home and what you grew up with.

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.

Every day there are small moments when we have a choice: will we take in more stuff, or just clear our minds out for a bit?

The Dalai Lama would say that meditation is something that can help everyone. But he's aware that it can be misused or things can go wrong.

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.

For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, "Where's your home?" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.

I like California because it still has the glamour and romanticism and exoticism of a very foreign place. It was the place that when I was young, I was raised on "I Love Lucy" and listening to the Grateful Dead and reading Jack Kerouac. They, to me, were all symbols of this very foreign sense of promise and movement. After all this time here I'm glad I still have it.